(The Morning Watch is a recurring feature that highlights a handful of noteworthy videos from around the web. They could be video essays, fanmade productions, featurettes, short films, hilarious sketches, or just anything that has to do with our favorite movies and TV shows.)

In this edition, listen to Michael Bolton‘s theme song for Game of Thrones, as if the series were a cheesy drama from the early 1990s. Plus, a video essay for Christopher Nolan‘s Memento takes a closer look at telling a story in reverse and Futurama voice star Billy West reenacts a scene from Back to the Future as Fry and Professor Farnsworth.

Either Westeros shrank in the past season, or there’s something funny going on with the Game of Thrones timeline. And “Beyond the Wall” director Alan Taylor admits as much.

The sixth episode of season 7 of Game of Thrones featured some implausible travel by foot and by raven, in which Gendry runs to Eastwatch from Jon Snow’s little suicide squad battling White Walkers beyond the Wall, and is able to send a raven to Daenerys in Dragonstone on the other side of the country in less than a day.

Update: HBO has released the official running time and title for the Game of Thrones season 7 finale, which will be as long as a feature film. You can find the new information below.

By now, it’s common knowledge that the seventh season of Game of Thrones will be a fair bit shorter than the previous six seasons, running only seven episodes instead of ten. But now, we know the silver lining. There may be fewer episodes in total, but several of those episodes will be longer than any previous chapter of HBO’s fantasy series.

(Welcome to The Soapbox, the space where we get loud, feisty, political, and opinionated about anything and everything. In this edition: did Game of Thronesjump the shark in its most recent episode?)

KnowYourMeme defines the term “jumping the shark” as “an idiomatic expression describing a pivotal moment when a successful creative effort begins a significant decline in quality.” We won’t be able to look back and see if Game of Thrones has hit that “pivotal moment” until the series is finished, or at least until a few more episodes have aired, but from where I stand, this week’s episode (“Beyond The Wall”) feels pretty damn pivotal – and I’m not thrilled about the new direction that pivot implies.Read More »

Last night’s Game of Thrones episode, entitled “Beyond the Wall,” featured yet another ambitious battle scene as Jon Snow, Tormund Giantsbane, Ser Jorah Mormont, and a few other fan-favorite characters went on a mission in the icy wastelands north of Eastwatch-by-the-sea and faced off against the Night King’s army of the dead.

And much like they did after this season’s “The Spoils of War,” HBO has now released an in-depth behind the scenes video that details the tricky techniques the production used to achieve many of the episode’s biggest and most explosive moments. This should go without saying, but there are obviously huge spoilers for last night’s episode in this video, so consider yourselves warned if you haven’t caught up. Check out the detailed video below.Read More »

(In our coverage of Game of Thrones season 7, we’ll be examining each episode with one simple question in mind – which character is winning the game of thrones this week?)

“Beyond the Wall” may be the most frustrating episode of Game of Thrones ever produced. It’s a technical marvel, filled with characters we love placed into situations dire and impossible and heartbreaking. It’s also a narrative mess, leaning on convenience and deus ex machina and leaps in logic to get where it needs to go. Game of Thrones season 7 has been on fast-forward since the start, but here’s the episode where it stopped being weird and started becoming a concern.

(The Morning Watch is a recurring feature that highlights a handful of noteworthy videos from around the web. They could be video essays, fanmade productions, featurettes, short films, hilarious sketches, or just anything that has to do with our favorite movies and TV shows.)

In this edition, on this day that a total eclipse of the heart sun will be seen in certain parts of the world, take a look at the history of eclipses in film and television. Plus, go behind the scenes of the disco music video for “Guardians Inferno” from the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 soundtrack and watch a Game of Thrones trailer cut in the style of Justice League and Thor: Ragnarok. Read More »

The internet is dark and full of spoilers — because the second Game of Thrones episode in two weeks has leaked online. But don’t worry, it’s not from trollish hackers who want to ruin whatever bombshells Game of Thrones‘ sixth episode has waiting for us. It was an accident.

The unaired sixth episode of Game of Thrones‘ seventh season, “Death is the Enemy,” was accidentally aired by HBO Nordic in Spain for an hour before it was removed. But that was enough time for the episode to make its way to file-sharing sites and Reddit — from which it will inevitably spread like wildfire.

Last night’s Game of Throneswas a “breather” episode, but it was also a belter, bringing unlikely characters together for a death-defying mission and threatening to drive wedges between others. One of those wedges involved a secret letter obtained by Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish – a letter that was found by Arya Stark and whose contents remain a mystery.

Well, sort of. This is the internet and this is Game of Thrones, so of course everyone figured out what the letter says and what’s going on here. In fact, those with long memories will know exactly what this note says. But if you’d rather discover what’s going on in the context of the story, consider this your spoiler warning.